It’s a lightning rod issue capable of dividing a crowded room and, now that the legal debate over race-based preferences is more settled at the college level, Rock River Valley educators are preparing for the repercussions.

They reacted to the Supreme Court’s April 22 decision upholding Michigan’s ban on race-based preferences in college admissions with acceptance, pressing on with a promised commitment to diversity in the classroom, workplace and community.

They also agreed that there should be no effect on either the Rockford University or Rock Valley College campuses.

“We have no race-based policies in our admissions practices and feel that we’re able to create a diverse student body without it,” Rockford University President Robert Head said. He noted that up to 30 percent of the university’s first-year students are minorities.

Head is a black man who obviously overcame challenges to get where he’s at. A hot-topic issue like race-based preferences, he said, is a distraction to what should be the long-range, overarching goal — increasing education levels for everyone.

He noted that race-based preferences and affirmative action have been hotly contested since their start. The legal debate, he said, was made clear in 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of University of California v. Bakke that the school’s use of racial “quotas” was unconstitutional.

The medical school was reserving 16 of 100 entering seats for minorities, including “Blacks,” “Chicanos,” “Asians,” and “American Indians.” Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were “significantly higher” than some admitted minority students.

“This is not new,” Head said. “It should not be a surprise to anyone.”

He’s still concerned, though, about the possible repercussions for education institutions founded to support blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.

Rock Valley College business student Torin Kasper, 19, said she has encountered several people her age upset about race-based preferences. A Native American who belongs to Wisconsin’s Ojibwe band, she also has concerns.

“I don’t know,” Kasper said. “There should be a little, like, standard to make sure everybody’s kind of included. But if it’s, like, extreme, then maybe not.”

RVC open policy

Rock Valley College has unrestricted open enrollment.

Melvin Allen, the school’s new executive director of student recruitment, emphasizes that the community college is equal access and doesn’t discriminate based on race, ethnicity or color.

When responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights leader’s “I Have A Dream” speech, which calls for a day when children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“It was time for them to take a stand, to say no longer are you able to do that,” said Allen of the Supreme Court’s justices and their 6-2 decision.

Students of color, he said, need to be mentored and given equal access because they are human beings. And the human populace, he added, should always aspire to respect those who come from different walks of life and be able to imagine walking in their shoes.

Jim Applegate, the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s executive director, still points out some disturbing statistics from a recent report by the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation.

According to the report, blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics still trail whites by more than 10 percent in degree attainment and 53.5 percent of the bottom third of the income scale goes to college compared with 82.4 percent of the top third.

“We will not have a successful workforce unless we do a better job of getting those students to college and through college,” he said, stating disappointment in the Supreme Court’s decision. “The system is not operating equitably.

“Anything that begins to put barriers in the way of achieving that goal of fairness in college opportunity is not a positive development for our future.”

Help or hindrance?

Rock Valley College student Stacey Patla, 39, has received the benefits of preference programs in the past. She said her military past helped her to enter law enforcement and gender helped her get into a carpentry program.

“It made things hard for me,” Patla said. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, well. You got right in because you’re a female. It lessens the achievement, so to speak, that you earn by being there and going through the program, sometimes maybe feeling that you didn’t necessarily deserve to be there.”

There’s a reason she likes the television program, “The Voice,” and it’s blind auditions.

“That’s the coolest thing,” she said. “If people would apply that all around (in) interviews (and) different situations … it would be a better society.”